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Messages - Firn
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552
« on: November 03, 2020, 11:45 »
Strictly speaking, you are not allowed to use other people's work in your stock images and so using a sky from Photoshop or Luminar (unless it is one of your own sky pictures) is not allowed. It would be interesting to hear Matt from Adobe Stock's view on this? Although I don't know how to bring it to his attention!
Steve
I am pretty certain that those skies are labeled for commercial reuse meaning that you can reuse a photo in any way, even commercially.
That isn't applicable to the stock question. You don't have the rights so you couldn't use them in a stock submission. You could use them to make a pamphlet or a billboard or something.
From the SS Submission and Account Guidelines:
You must own or control the copyright to all content you submit to Shutterstock. This means that you cannot submit work obtained from other sources (e.g., online image search results or websites), or incorporate such work into your content submissions, unless you have permission to do so
Therefore the restrictions not absolute, and as I said, I am pretty certain that both Adobe and Skylum, secured those rights and permissions for their customers.
Admin reply from the Skylum forum to a question whether such images can be sold: Users can use edited photos for any purpose. All the pictures for the sky replacement are accompanied by appropriate documentation (photograph copyright license and consent agreements). So there's no copyright rights violation. So, yes, you are allowed to use their skys for stockphotos, at least according to Skylum's rules. Not sure what's the stock agency's stance on this.
553
« on: October 30, 2020, 10:31 »
Thanks Jo Ann.
I guess what threw my a little with this topic is there used to be a rank listed in your contributor account on Adobe Stock, right at the bottom, but it disappeared some time ago.
Mat - is there an easy way to see our 'rank' now?
It's at the top left corner, if you sort your earnings for "all time" instead of the "this year" default setting, it shows you your rank next to your lifetime earnings. Unless you are taking about the bronze/silver/blah rank system?
554
« on: October 26, 2020, 06:01 »
along with being the only site that has refunds.
Shutterstock, Dreamstime and Alamy have refunds too.
555
« on: October 24, 2020, 05:30 »
Either no one is downloading the free images, or the free downloads aren't being tallied (although you'd hope they were), or that the undiscovered content numbers are refreshed very often as downloads occur. Given how big the download counts are at other free sites, I had assumed we would see some huge decrease in undiscovered content in Adobe's Free section as downloads took off...
But Adobe says that the undiscovered filter may not be updated in real time. For all we know it may be updated once a week only, so I would not rely on these numbers to be accurate. And why would people want to download from ASF?
1. Unsplash is also free
2. Content quality is same or better
3. You don't need to create an account/login
If ASF was launched in 2002, it would have been very popular.
I don't think that word got around to people who don't look for photos on Adobe that there are now free images so fast. It takes time. Right now, when you google for "Free Stock images", Adobe doesn't even come up on the first page (Shutterstock comes in first by the way ...  ), so it's not easy for people who want free images to get to know about this. But I expect that at least the people who have a Adobe account + subscription already would also download the free images. If you're here anyways already, and are paying for content, why not take the free content along?
556
« on: October 21, 2020, 04:43 »
.
557
« on: October 20, 2020, 23:55 »
So, the free collection has been out for a week today.
Anyone notices a rise in sales, like Adobe expected? Because so far I certainly haven't. Not that I expected it, but who knows, maybe the increasement in sales will come once people have used up all their 70.000 free images? Oh, wait, but in a year they will be replaced by new images. So that will probably never happen....
558
« on: October 20, 2020, 03:30 »
I am content with my September earnings on iStock. Nothing too crazy, but a solid month.
559
« on: October 19, 2020, 04:11 »
In the photo department they are still king but not in the way they were 2 years ago. At this pace Photoshop will also loose leadership soon.
I don't think they are king in that department. I have Lightroom due to the bonus brogram, but I don't use it. I prefer Luminar, not just because it is not a subscription-softwear, but because it can do all the basic things Lightroom can do as well. Maybe there might be some in-deptht functions only Lightroom has, but how many people are willing to spend 3 hours editing photos for microstock where you get cents for an image? The basic functions are more than enough for that and Luminar only costs you a fraction of Lightroom and there are quite a few softwears like this that offer all the basic functions needed. However, sadly I have not found a good replacement for photoshop yet, due to photoshops very useful option to use hand-written scripts with the program. I know there are some other softwears like Affinity Photo that promised they will implement it and when the day comes and I don't get free photoshop from the Bonus program, I will gladly switch over. And all of this not because of some grudge with Adobe because of some free image gallery, but because I absolutely detest subscription model softwear. I held on to my very old Photoshop version as long as I could before it became impossible to run it on a modern computer. I don't like it. I want to pay money for a softwear - even if it is an expensive one - if and when I have the money for it.
560
« on: October 19, 2020, 03:28 »
So I now see Adobe’s press releases everywhere, with people crowing about how Adobe is “democratizing” art by giving away images and footage for free, effectively helping to put tens of thousands of us out of business.
I don’t see any press releases about Adobe “democratizing” anything by giving away their software for free, though. Wouldn’t that be helpful, if Adobe fought their competitors who make their software available for free by also offering Adobe software for free? I know creatives were really angry that Adobe switched to a yearly subscription, which costs people a lot more.
Weird that Adobe thinks people should pay more for their software and nothing for other people’s work.
To be fair, Adobe did pay the artists for submitting their content to the free collection.
How much?
More than the annual RPI of each image. That's, if I am not mistaken, all the info we have.
561
« on: October 19, 2020, 01:39 »
Yes, refunds are a whole huge open window for abuse and I think any customer should provide a very detailed and beliavable explanation why he wants to "return" an image. Basically large technical flaws should be the only allowed option for refunds (and then it's debatable whether the agency or the contributor are to blame, as the agency did a "quality control" after all)
It's stupid to allow refunds for something you can't really give back and get to keep - the full size image without watermarks. It is even more stupid to allow it months after the sale happaned like Alamy does. Yes, strictly speaking the customers return the licence and thenaren't allowed to use the image, but when you see a full size image of yours somewhere, how are you to know whether the customer has a licence?
562
« on: October 16, 2020, 03:07 »
I think I had three this month. Got a mail about one and two more image just disappeared from my sale list. I had a refund only once before that and then the mail about it arrived weeks later, so I am not sure I am just overlooking things or really had 3 refunds. If it's 3 that's 3 more than I usually have per month, because, as said, only had one single refund in the whole year prior to that.
563
« on: October 15, 2020, 01:04 »
I've seen a number of tongue-in-cheek comments here about Adobe giving away software. I would like to remind you that we have given away tens of thousands of complimentary subscriptions through the Adobe Stock contributor Bonus Progam over the past couple of years and that we are continuing the tradition again with the 2020 program. So to answer your specific question... yes, for productive contributors Adobe is giving away a free app each year.
Mat, I think your comparison is lacking. I appreciate very much that Adobe is having the bonus programm. It's a nice bonus, but it's not "given away for free". It's tied to a condition. The condition that we contributors manage to sell a certain amount of images or footage and therefore the condition is that we earn Adobe a certain amount of money. We earn you money, you give us a bonus for that. The proper comparison to the free image collection would be: If a customer downloads 100 paid images, he gets 1 image for free. That would be a more accurate comparison. He earns you money, he gets a bonus in return. That's how our bonus program works. But you are giving away free images without any conditions. The "customer" doesn't have to do anything to get the free images, while we contributors have to earn you money to get the "free" softwear. Two rather different things, don't you think? My overall opinion on this free image collection is: I do believe Adobe did this with a good intention and not to screw contributors over. After all, if we don't benefit from this, neither do they, so they really believe it will boost sales. However, I believe the selection of free images is way too large and don't think it will have the desired effect of more paid customers. I have a fear it might be the opposite. With such a huge collection of free high quaity images, I don't think people who usually don't pay for images will be motivated to do so now. It just means more free content to pick from for them after all. But people who have paid for images in the past might think "Why should I pay if they give away so many great pictures for free?". Other stock agencies have one free image a week or even month, not thousands of them. I hope Adobe will monitor customer behavior closely in regards of whether peope who get free content also start buying paid content and will make the right decision to back down from this whole free collection again if they see that it does not work out as intended and I hope that by then the damage done won't be too big. People who have gotten used to getting high quality work for free will have a hard time adjusting to the thought that they should pay for it again and might just search elsewhere for free images instead of getting back to paying for content.
564
« on: October 11, 2020, 09:39 »
Yes, some, but not all, sales give you 10% more.
But unfortunately the $0.03 isn't really making much of a difference. If you sell around 100 images on DT per month and with most sales being 0.35 subs, that's just an extra $3 per month. I don't want to be ungrateful. I am sure for big earners who sell 10.000+ images there each month it makes a decent difference in income, but for smaller earners not so much.
565
« on: October 11, 2020, 04:40 »
The program is not on hold, but the deadline for it is February 2021. That's when the new codes will be given out and you have to pay for our Adobe softwear till then.
566
« on: October 07, 2020, 01:18 »
How do you work out how much a photo has made on istock? I have stats for sales but can't see how much individual photos have made.
Go to http://www.istockphoto.com/my_uploads.php and it is in the far right column called "royalties"
The link gives me an error message (probably because istock tries to redirect me automatically to the German version of their site, even though that's not even my language setting) Can you tell me how to navigate there from the Contributor dashboard? I don't see any option called "my uploads" there.
567
« on: September 22, 2020, 06:12 »
To me the numbers look pretty much exactly like what I expected.
Also, I feel like all of this doesn't weight in the change in royalities on Shutterstock, which might have a bigger effect on how much people upload than a pandemic. Many people stopped uploading to Shutterstock or uploaded less because of the lower royalities, not because of Corona. At the same time a lot of contributors told people to switch over to Adobe, which many people did, as you can see from various forum entries. I think that's a major factor in contributors' upload behaviour as well.
568
« on: September 16, 2020, 07:18 »
Also had this problem earlier today, but it seems to be working fine now.
569
« on: September 13, 2020, 15:01 »
I never understood why so many people praised Alamy to begin with. Just because - usually - royalities are higher than with other agencies? (And that's not even really the case for me, I had multiple sales that earned me as little as 2.84 there.) What's the point if you earn $10 for an image, but only have 1 or 3 sales each month? Even if other agencies pay less per image, I still earn way more for the exact same work I put into this.
At the beginning I uploaded to them frequently, but sales were so rare, it didn't seem worth it and I stopped completely. Then, maybe a year ago, I had one large sale which motivated me to keep uploading again, but after that one big sale it just went back to the 1-2 average sales each month and a refund for a sale that happened months ago (and the image was still being used on a website and I had to run after them for weeks to finally get at least part of that money back) was the final straw for me. It's really not worth the effort. I earn on other agencies in a month what I earn on Alamy in a year. By the way, Dreamstime earnes me about 3x as much as Alamy. Dreamstime is certainly far from doing great, but at least I do actually get money from them regularly, so it's a "little bit extra" that's worth it to me. I don't even know when was the last time I reached payout on Alamy. January maybe? Had enough sales for another payout since then, but you know how it takes months to actually get the money on your account after a sale... another thing I find not acceptable with them.
570
« on: September 10, 2020, 12:53 »
You keep making threads about your new stock site here and people keep asking you what are the royalities and what have you to offer to attrackt customers that other small and new sites don't, because most of us have wasted enough time uploading content to sites that don't have enough customers to make it worth our time, but you fail to answer these questions and now you want people to start uploading and still can't answer these questions....? Why is it so hard to just say it? Why the big secret? Your stock site is getting more and more unappealing by the day (or thread) and you haven't even really started yet. 
571
« on: September 02, 2020, 06:06 »
Is that a new image or an oldie? I did the test with a 3 year old photo. I assume it takes quite some time to tag 300 million images ...
That particular one is about one year old.
572
« on: September 02, 2020, 04:13 »
As Jo Ann said, at this moment, only Depositphotos and Dreamstime have the licensable tag, and 123rf and Canstock show the Product tag.
This means that Adobe and Shutterstock are running far behind those 4.
Shutterstock now tries to solve this problem quickly by teaming up with Google, but this ONLY has effect on THEIR FUTURE searches. Every image sold before today, sold by Shutterstock, showing up in a search on a buyer's website, will NOT have a tag.
I don't think that's correct? I just did a quick search and could find multiple of my photos on Google from Shutterstock with a tag, even though none of these photos sold recently, some even never sold at all. I found some that don't have the tag as well, but I don't know why some have it and others don't. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with sales or recent or old files, as far as I can tell.
573
« on: August 30, 2020, 13:04 »
So, it comes down to decision Adobe vs Istock exclusive.
Adobe does not offer any exclusive programm and going exclusive on one agency without any benefit does not seem ike a smart idea.
574
« on: August 28, 2020, 04:55 »
Firstly Paypal don't charge you a fee its paid for by the agencies so unless you signed up for a Paypal business account theres nothing to account for.
Actually they do. If you get money in a currency that is not your country's, they charge you a conversion fee in addition to the exchange rate. You might not have noticed this, because it's never listed seperately, but they do: https://www.paypal.com/uk/smarthelp/article/how-does-paypal-calculate-currency-conversion--exchange-rate-faq1835If a currency conversion is needed for your payment, we'll use a retail exchange rate. The retail exchange rate (set by an outside financial institution) is our wholesale cost of foreign currency plus a currency conversion fee. That's the reason why the exchange rate from PayPal always seems to be a crappy one compared to the official exchange rates and you always end up with less money than what you would get with the official exchange rates.
575
« on: August 28, 2020, 04:27 »
I am not from the UK, but from Germany, but I am also doing it like fotoVoyager. I only declare the money I actually get, not some fictional amount calculated by what 0.10$ were in € on the day the sale happened and everything else sounds wrong to me. If between the time the sale happens and the time the I get the money the exchange rate got worse, I don't understand why I should be the one to pay taxes on the money that I am actually not getting - The stock agency is holding on to the money and till the moment I get the money, it's theirs and I am not paying taxes on it. Just imagine an agency would suddenly close your account or go out of business and you would actually never get your money - Would you still pay full taxes on the money from sales you never got paid for? It's quite similar to that. It's not your money till you get paid. I do include any fees from PayPal to the earnings through, because unlike with money stitting on a stock agency's site, that money is actually mine the moment it hits my PayPal account, so I have to pay taxes on all of it, even if I have to pay fees with it. So, basically I declare taxes on everything I get on my PayPal account according to the exchange rate on the date I get the money, not on what I get transferred to my bank account on a different date. It would be something different if you sold images on your own website and got the money in real time - Then you would need to pay taxes on the money according to the exchange rate on the date the sale happened, as that's when you get the money, regardless of when you actually transfer it from your PayPal (or any other service) to your bank account and what the exchange rate is at that time. But with stock agencies the money is not really your's till you get paid by them, so no logical reasons why you should pay taxes before you get paid. In your case I would really double check with your tax office whether what you were told was correct. I am not saying that I know things better than a tax office (especially since yours is not even in my country and might have other rules), but I have made the experience that, at least here, when it comes to "modern" and not conventional earning structures through the internet, a lot of personel in the tax office seem to be unsure how to handle it correctly, or don't even fully understand it. I remember the first time I went there to ask some questions about earning money by selling art online, the staff I talked too had a lot of trouble understanding the concept and she seemed like she was just guessing around. I even got a written note that said that there was no guarantee that the information I got was correct and that if I did something wrong with my tax declaration based on that information, I would be the one to be held accountable.
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